Episode 3.09: Jeremy Lu
THE PODCAST: February 2, 2021
ON VALUES, ONLINE TOOLS + LIVING MANY LIVES
Tim and Tuesday welcome Jeremy Lu, co-founder of the online collaboration tool GroupMap. Get ready for a conversation that reveals his incredible life experiences, and digs into why it matters which online tools we use to build the world we want.
Together, Tim Merry and Tuesday Ryan-Hart are THE OUTSIDE—systems change and equity facilitators who bring the fresh air necessary to organize movements, organizations, and collaborators forward for progress, surfacing new mindsets for greater participation and shared impact.
3.09 — SHOW NOTES
Tuesday + Tim: Today on the podcast, we are talking to Jeremy Lu, the co-founder of GroupMap. GroupMap is a software platform that we use in most of our meetings at this point as it really helps us to do our work well, both in a strategic sense and a human sense. And, although Jeremy is quite young, he’s had about 800 different lives so we are going to hear about that. We’re also going to get into the values that are underneath these online tools. As a founder of an online tool, or as a user of an online tool, how do you engage with these type of things from a place of values as well as a place of tool, usability and effectiveness.
Tim: In the midst of all of the tech, how do we enable the human interaction and synchronicity and the connection that is fundamentally human in all of this?
Tues: It was the human and lack of pretentiousness of why we chose to work with Jeremy and GroupMap.
Tim: Many of the people we talked to felt like we were being pitched a product and when we talked to Jeremy it felt like we were being invited into a relationship. That was a fundamental difference and I think it is reflected into the technology. It’s set up to build relationship between our participants. We were looking for more than a Zoom meeting and how we could bring in the magic of a face-to-face.
Jeremy: One of the amazing things of partnership, and relationship, with The Outside, is that I didn’t realize how real the people were. When you first meet people, you take them on face value but then as I kept working with you, I kept realizing that you are the same people that I originally met. The same level of professionalism, the same level of craziness, the need to achieve as well as the desire to connect and to make change… that’s definitely come through each and every time.
Jeremy: I developed GroupMap out of the teaching practice as a way to engage students in dialogue and conversation and case studies; not just turn my back to them and write to the wall.
Tim: What’s the red thread, or question, you’ve been asking yourself everywhere you go, that got you to GroupMap? What is that has kept you moving on?
Jeremy: I left a lot of jobs because of a values clash…. and the other half was serendipity. Leaving one job to go to another was always driven by, “am I being my true self here? Have I given it a red-hot go?”
Tuesday: I believe in serendipity and I think that that happens when we are aligning with our values and what we are here to do, which feels like that has been a compass for you, and I am curious how this lands for you that serendipity seems to also happen when somebody sees something in you. Part of what I am hearing in your journey, Jeremy, is people seeing something in you and you being willing to say yes to that too.
Jeremy: You do need to recognize, seek, search and discover. I’ve always tried to do a lot of that in facts, figures and numbers in my younger days. As I age, I am finding that I am worrying less about the numbers and more about the people.
Tim: I am really interested, partly because I feel there are a set of values that underlie GroupMap, and you keep saying that you’ve made a series of values-based choices. What are some of those compass values for you? What are the non-negotiable stances you’ve chosen to take?
Jeremy: Personally, the ones I know that have come out are hope, honestly, resilience and respect. They are the ones that always seem to surface. Resilience, for me, is a combination of discipline and professionalism and hanging on when you want to fight for something that is right.
Jeremy: I am excited about where the world is heading in terms of trying to bridge distances. Even with COVID, it hasn’t stopped connection; it’s made it more tricky but the need for human connection will just mean that people continue to innovate, they will find ways, they will look for things that work, they will just keep going. That in its way will pave its way for new opportunities.
Tuesday: For us and our work, we are charting new waters with GroupMap and it feels like one of the tools to show we are moving forward into what’s next.
Jeremy: That’s right, Tuesday, it’s just a tool. Everyone that works with a tool that’s the person that’s bringing the energy and the outcome. We are the hammer and everyone else is the tradesperson. The quality of the work and the quality of outcome - yes, to have a good, quality tool makes sense but it still comes back down to that human influence. I don’t think we will take the need for that away. We designed GroupMap to give teachers a way in which to facilitate better conversations and the same way in which The Outside does its work.
Tim: Our team is moving away, perhaps, from WhatsApp to Signal because of WhatsApp change of agreement around data protection but there has been a huge pause button put on this move by our team because all of the far-right are moving onto that platform at the moment and we don’t want to be part of that migration. So, on some level, we can think about Signal as just a tool… but how that tool is leveraged matters, and who is leveraging that tool matters. So there is some level when a tool is not just a tool so I wonder what insight you might have on that as a good person who’s in this world and also who has designed a tool. Do you have boundaries around the use of that tool or who uses it or how it’s used?
Jeremy: The conscience buyer, who looks at the food they eat and where it comes from, is now the same thing that’s happening in software. We fill out questionnaires about child labour, slavery, anti-corruption, bribery, are we a minority, is there gay and lesbian representation. All these questions are large and small and down to the individual buyer. It’s coming into the software industry so we’re not immune to all of this. So this concept that you are talking about - “should we just see applications as a tool?” Yes, in terms of work but you still have, as a buying group, the capability to choose which tool you pick. What is the ethical decision for you? We have similar decision-making processes that we go through when working with third-party apps.
Song: “Memories” by Maroon 5
Poem: “The Hill We Climb," by Amanda Gorman
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Duration: 50:41
Produced by: Mark Coffin
Theme music: Gary Blakemore
Episode cover image: source